Anna van Schaap

Vice President of Women’s Philanthropic Equity and Arts & Cultural Platforms and Client Services

Anna van Schaap is a Detroit based Fine Artist and Curator. She graduated Summa Cum Laude, with highest honors, from the University of Michigan, with a degree in Fine Arts, and supplementary concentrations in Art History & Curatorial Studies as well as Women’s Studies. For her Fine Arts degree she works predominantly in painting and photography, with additional interests in film and video. While attending the University of Michigan, she joined several activist organizations, focused on Women’s Rights, Racial Justice, and Environmental Action. While working as a photographer for a University of Michigan research team, studying network analysis research in conjunction with the microcredit industry in Honduras, she discovered an additional passion for photojournalism and photo-documentation, which still factors in her activist-based projects to this day including documenting the BLM protests in Detroit.

As a fine artist, Anna exhibits her work both Nationally and Internationally, with work in personal and public collections across the world. Her work focuses primarily on Femme-representation. Her work ovrlaps traditional portraiture with surrealism, while exploring ideas of Femme identity, expression, representation, symbolism, communication/the inability to communicate, and the psychopathology that arises from being silenced. Her fine art, photo documentation, and collaborative projects have been published in Hyperallergic, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Uproxx, The Art Newspaper, Art Tribune, Artvoice, Salon, W Magazine, Newsweek, Juxtapose Magazine, Vice Magazine, Nylon, NYMag, Broadly, Refinery 29, Detroit Free Press, and Artforum.

As a curator she has worked for several Detroit and Greater Detroit based galleries including Galleri 454 and Galleri 2987. In 2015 she founded her own curatorial organization, Things Feel Heavy, and has independently curated and guest curated exhibitions for the Scarab Club, the Charles H. Wright Museum, The Carr Center, The AAAC, MCCC, T. H. Muller Galleri, amongst many other small artist-run spaces. Additionally, she has guest lectured as a Fine Artist and Curator at Wayne State University and MCCC, and has sat on several artist panels, curatorial panel talks, and portfolio reviews.

She is deeply passionate about the arts and expanding art opportunities for artists, while working towards more gender and racial equity in the field of Art.